TOP LINE Congress returns from the July 4th holiday and dives into a three-week sprint of work before the longer August recess. Appropriations bills remain the focus, with the Senate set to markup the Leg. Branch, CJS, and FSGG bills on Thursday. Look out for the proposed text perhaps the day before. The NDAA is slated to hit the House […]
TOP LINE This week Congress starts its two-week Independence Day holiday. We’re hoping to take next week off from writing our little newsletter, but we’ll be back. Among the highlights from this past week: Senate Appropriators adopted 302(b) allocations that are very different from the House’s untenable numbers, but with many Republican defections the National […]
“The introduction of a resolution to grant Senate staff unionization rights long available to workers across this country is an important step toward strengthening Congress,” said Taylor J. Swift, senior policy advisor at Demand Progress. “We commend Senator Sherrod Brown and all senators supporting this important resolution to improve congressional workforce rights. A year of […]
Today, Rep. Kevin Kiley and Rep. Jamie Raskin in the House and Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Mike Lee, and Sen. Durbin in the Senate reintroduced the Protecting Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, legislation that prohibits overreach by government prosecutors seeking to extract confidential information and sources from reporters and their communications providers. The […]
TOP LINE After a House Administration Subcommittee hearing focused on the personal rather than the institutional aspects of the Office of Congressional Ethics, we take a deeper look at why that office is vital to an ethical Congress. Congressional unions scored an historic win for committee staff and others. This week both chambers are in […]
Today, several congressional offices — including the House Education and Workforce Committee’s Democratic staff — have filed union petitions in the House. Staffers in Reps. Val Hoyle, Sylvia Garcia, and Mark DeSaulnier have all recently filed union petitions while a majority of staffers in the offices of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Pocan, Mark Takano, Sean […]
TOP LINE This week. The House and Senate are in and we will see whether Republican House leadership regains control of the floor. (We discuss the power struggle in more detail in the next section.) We expect to see top-line appropriations numbers in the House, a few (big) appropriations markups, and NDAA subcommittee markups in […]
In advance of tomorrow’s House Administration Oversight Subcommittee hearing on the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), 35 organizations and individuals across the political spectrum sent a letter today to leaders of the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee urging them to protect and further strengthen the OCE in its mission. Notably, the coalition asks for the removal […]
TOP LINE The debt limit crisis mercifully is over, for now, without the Senate as much as cutting into its three-day weekend. The institutional conditions that enabled the drama, however, remain. For now, it’s back to business on the urgent matters of the day like messaging bills about appliances. We’ll be waiting for the stalled […]
In a win for government spending transparency, the House is publishing highly detailed information about the money it spends on itself. The Clerk of the House just released the latest House Statements of Disbursements — which catalog every penny spent by every person in the House of Representatives — with new metadata (or entity identifiers). […]
TOP LINE Appropriations bills’ markups, scheduled to begin last week, have taken a hiatus awaiting the outcome of the topic du jour. It’s not clear that House Republicans would have been able to pass those bills individually. This week: the deal that Pres. Biden and Speaker McCarthy have reached to raise the debt limit scrambled the […]
TOP LINE Government accountability requires both structural mechanisms and personal will. By moderately decreasing funding levels for the Legislative branch, House appropriators preserved most of the structural accountability capacity of Congress in their FY 2024 spending package. Individuals, however, continue to dodge holding peers accountable. The US Capitol Police is allowing former acting chief Yogananda […]